Atomic Nerds

Things discovered today:
First, three days in my fridge is not enough to even begin to thaw a 12lb turkey. An afternoon in a spare fermenting bucket with a trickle of cold water running has improved matters slightly, but not significantly. With luck, sitting like that overnight will do the trick without bringing in all sorts of unwanted microbial guests so I can get it in a brine* tomorrow for cooking Thursday.

Next, LabRat and rifle scopes are still enemies. 7mm rem. mag is, as we discovered previously, not too thumpy for her, but that doesn’t mean much when the eye relief of the scope combined with the eye relief of prescription glasses to put the target image somewhere completely unrelated to where her cornea/retina were. We’ll figure this out sooner or later, but in the meanwhile it’s more than a little frustrating. At least I got a reasonably nifty shot with some muzzle-blast in frame.

From the good news department, Stingray and premium ammo are best friends. Previous range trips with the Bambimatic 7000 had been less than rewarding, as the only .30-06 ammo on hand was de-linked milsurp purchased to feed a Garand (and screw you for not knowing Garand, wordpress/firefox spell check!). Strangely, said nasty looking green-can special wouldn’t so much form a group as it would occasionally put a couple of shots on the paper at opposite ends if you were lucky. Amazingly enough, switching to 180gr Federal Fusion popped a nice group right off the bat. It certainly wasn’t the tightest group I’d ever shot (off a sling instead of a bipod, so there’s a little wiggle), but it was certainly minute-of-elk. From this point any failure to shoot sub-MOE is operator error (and I wouldn’t rule out sub-MOA with more practice in the future).

Also discovered, at closer ranges I can still pull the occasional nifty shot. To keep the day from being just rote trudge-trudge-bang-bang-little to the left-bang-bang, we hauled along a 7lb can of ketchup. Setting it up on the 75 yard berm (since we were the only ones at the range), we found an intact clay pigeon. Since something was gonna get shot anyway, the only logical thing to do was to prop the clay up on top of the ketchup can and play William Tell. We duly gave the can its last cigarette, and miracle of miracles the apple pigeon neatly went poof off the can without so much as a scratch to the label. Unfortunately, the camera we brought wouldn’t zoom tight enough to show anything really nifty, but in the clip below you can see the effects of the second shot were somewhat more traumatic to our tomato-based buddy. Also, 180gr .30-06 and ketchup cans are apparently natural enemies.

Ok, seeing it now that it’s uploaded, that clips sucks overall. You can see better in fullscreen. Next time we’ll haul along a proper video camera if we’re gonna do something fun like that.

While the curse of November/December is still going strong, things appear to be under control for the moment (knock on wood). Tomorrow will find us in Santa Fe raiding for beer supplies, a few last minute outdoor supplies, and general and sundry shopping of the season. If normal patterns hold, this will go horribly and will produce a good rant. In the meanwhile, I’m going to go stare furiously at the turkey thawing in my bathtub until the heat of my frustration with these clunky laws of thermodynamics causes it to finish melting.

*You don’t brine your bird? Short of going out to eat, how do you keep something that big from turning to plywood in the oven without a brine?

Posted Ballistic Mood Improvers, Food, homestead |